Sufferer Old Man; Implict And Explicit Complex Ptsd

[TeddySue]

Bitzer-

Did your mother demand that you be her happiness by "taking care" of her in thought word and deed? As a Christian I feel the deep burden to forgive, and when I (just last night) realize I have NOT forgiven those who have hurt me AND the ones who trigger me, I feel defeated. How did Alice Miller give you permission to do something against what we are taught as a child: forgive? My mother was, too, a victim queen who knew how to put the "guilt trip" on my shoulders every time. Did you experience that, too? Thank you so much for your posts. Would someone please tell me how to put less into quotes instead of the whole quote?

 

[jeeps for now]

I think a lot of self-realization keys into the ability to relax. Sleep is my meditation. Yes, my ptsd does calm down whenever I find an apple, but it is not usually immediate. I have to cognitively and emotionally digest the discovery first. It took me years to find the first one.

 

[bitzer]

TeddySue, to reduce the quote, just edit the text between the start quote tag (open-square-bracket, "quote="blah blah, close-square-bracket) and the end quote tag (open-square-bracket, slash, "quote", close-square-bracket).

"... a mongrel not fit to be related to them" - that is spot on. They are soo up themselves.

"How did Alice Miller give you permission to ... [not] forgive?" I suppose the bit that crystalised it for me was a passage from The Body Never Lies, where she says that you can not free yourself from hatred by forgiving your parents; we only free ourselves from hate when we are free to express to our feelings.


jeeps for now, "... [apples] unseen for decades". It's funny how they're right in front of us for ages, but we never get to see them until we learn how to tune in.
I picture the trauma as an open gestalt. There is the narcissistic parent's wounding behaviour and the abused child's thoughts and conclusions about that behaviour. The gestalt is open because the Parent ego-state is created blameless and perfect, and yet the Child ego-state is created damaged and defective - they are poles apart. Obviously it is a gestalt because it's created by the gestalt of the parent's behaviour-event, so the child has to "fix" the gestalt by making some rationalisations that keep the disparate Parent and Child ego-states attached to each other. Not surprisingly, we can't make sense of the message implicit in the parent's behaviour, namely that abuse and love are the same thing.
When I'm working on an open gestalt, I reflect on the paradoxical contents of the Wounding Parent and Abused Child ego-states, and attempt to reconstruct the original event. It is very disturbing to do this as I tend to lose contact with who I am and act-out in the most bizarre fashion as I vacillate between the deranged and narcissitic Parent behaviour and the horrible experience of being the crushed and broken Child again.
It's a necessary evil, because understanding creates narrative, and narrative helps close the gestalt. I guess this is the bit you term, "... cognitively and emotionally digest the discovery ".

 

[Red Feather]

I am just realizing that I have an "apple" or many and that I have too look at them. I think I have been compensating for a real deep feeling of loneliness caused by neglect. And then my mother's guilt trip and vocal projection. I became simply nonexistant. I was just blown away. It really is disturbing but I hope I can now face all of this, the pain and dissociations are otherwise just to much to handle. I have to start remembering, or I am afraid my brain might be blown away by the pressure that has been building up.

I do want to live and be there for my children.

 

[freakofnurture]

I have developed the capacity to track back through my explicit traumas and detect the implicit traumas that logic dictates must have preceded them.

What exactly do you mean by 'implicit trauma'?

 

[Ghost427]

I can totally relate re family members. But I'm also coming to realize it could not have been otherwise... I wasn't the only person (though I was the designated victim/trouble) who was struggling to adapt to insanity. I have come to understand that I wasn't the only one in that house struggling for mental equilibrium an d that in many ways my siblings HAD to demonize me. They had to agree that I was the problem.. The alternative was too much for children to deal with. Or for them to deal with as adults. A terrible truth, an irreversible truth, but truth still.

 

[TeddySue]

Nadia: I am right there with you; we HAVE to make it for our children. I am an older mother (62) who adopted 7 children and now raising the last three. Just tonight I heard my youngest 13 year old say he got something from his dad and he keeps it safe. It nearly broke my heart. He cried for three years for his dad when he went to prison. I have to be there for him, to prove he hasn't lost everything.

Ghost: Isn't it sad to realize how permanent the damage can be when children are forced into an insane mold of their parents making? The things that were forced on us as children leave us still children with our needs never having been met.

 

[Ghost427]

Ts, yes very sad. I have many siblings, all of us past 50 now, none will have anything to do with me still. They drank the kool aid as children and it's too late for any of them to spit it up now. An awful truth.

 

[TeddySue]

Ts, yes very sad. I have many siblings, all of us past 50 now, none will have anything to do with me still. They drank the kool aid as children and it's too late for any of them to spit it up now. An awful truth.

May I ask what was the gist of the falsehoods these siblings were force-fed? OH, can I understand that parents can be so very cruel even to their own flesh and blood. I stay far away from my last living relatives and have learned a dear lesson: the kool aid was venomous and irreversible. I'm so sorry this happened in another family, other than mine. How long did it take you to realize your own parents would never protect you?

 

[bitzer]

Nadia said, "... real deep feeling of loneliness caused by neglect".
As an apple, that's a biggie. I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but I have always had a thing about trust. If i got the feeling that a relationship might work, it became an obsession fro me to make it work at any cost. Contrariwise, I would push people away at the drop of a hat - I know that that I've hurt a lot of people that I can now see cared about me a lot. These are the flip sides of neglect: the child-like need to make relationships work, and the parent-like pushing people away. The truth is that you need to protect yourself from narcissists, and you can learn to trust.

freakofnature said, "What exactly do you mean by 'implicit trauma'?".
When we are born there are large areas of the brain that are not formed. The Hippocampus is the organ of the brain responsible for explicit memory - you will have explicit memories of events in your life, like movie clips. The Hippocampus is not formed until we are about 2-3yrs old. However, the Amygdala, the organ of the brain responsible for implicit memories, is present at birth. Implicit memories are not like movie clips you can recall at will, you experience them as knee-jerk responses to certain stimuli - a lot of people have a knee-jerk response to rejection for example. Implicit trauma is trauma you don't have an explicit memory of, either because the trauma happened before your Hippocampus was formed or because you have repressed the explicit memory. Implicit trauma is a lot more difficult to deal with than explicit trauma, and early implicit trauma is a lot more difficult to deal with than repressed implicit trauma.

Ghost427 said, "...in many ways my siblings HAD to demonize me". I guess it's always a choice, but I agree; it was eat or be eaten in my family. My siblings went one way and I went another. I suppose I'm the lucky one really, they are still in the fog. All I've had deal with is childhood and a lifetime of pain and shame.
TeddySue said, "... How long did it take you to realize your own parents would never protect you?"
The more gut-wrenching thing for me was to realise that my mother never loved me and never will.

 

[TeddySue]

Blitzer: Why are we drawn to the Narcissists? Is it because we were "raised" by so-called parent Narcissists and that's all we know? Are we still trying to make it work with parents who never cared, vicariously through these newly found Narcissists? I seem to seek out the N and, like you said, obsess over them, only to get deeply hurt. I can totally understand the push-away part almost every time with people who care. Hurting so many people that I started, about 8 years ago, to tell them up front that I was not friend material.
What is your own definition of a Narcissist?

A knee-jerk reaction is what I call a trigger. I hear or see something that brings the abuse and neglect to mind and I immediately react in the negative toward whoever happens to be nearest or talking to me. I go into tunnel-vision and all the rest goes dark, making me unable to flee until the word-vomiting is over. I can not see it coming and it almost always is NOT about the person standing there or talking to me, but i can't know that until it's all over or I walk away. These are usually about rejection. Thank you for explaining implicit and explicit.

Do you think the so-called parents could have had a warped sense of love? I guess what I'm saying is my so-called mother thought she loved me but it was not anything near what I needed. I guess it made her feel better to tell me she loved me as a child and adult. She died never having given me a sense of love even from her warped attempt. They showed more love to every other child but me. I never pleased them in any way, EVER. And with their attempts to tell everyone how damaged I was, it never occurred to them that they could have made a difference. To be so utterly vulnerable and yet so totally dismissed by them left me in a child-like state of mind for 62 years. Searching for something that can never be.

 

[bitzer]

Blitzer: Why are we drawn to the Narcissists? Is it because we were "raised" by so-called parent Narcissists and that's all we know?

A knee-jerk reaction is what I call a trigger. I hear or see something that brings the abuse and neglect to mind and I immediately react in the negative toward whoever happens to be nearest or talking to me.
Searching for something that can never be.

I'm writing with tears in my eyes; it's just so great to connect with someone that gets it. "Searching for something that can never be" is so spot on. The day I realised Mother never loved me and never would was so painful, and yet so liberating. I could let go of a fundamental confusion that had kept me obsessing about my worthlessness for as long as I can remember.

Because I was "raised" by N's they feel familiar and I'm used to the idea that love means I give and they take. Normal people won't let me "love" them, i.e. suppress my needs and obsess about their needs. Normal people want to do stuff for me, and that doesn't make sense because it's the wrong way round.

People that have actually been neglected usually develop a knee-jerk reaction to rejection or being discounted. N's are different; they haven't necessarily suffered much actual neglect, but they were groomed by their parents (by repeatedly being threatened with abandonment) to have a phobic reaction to rejection, with the result that they have a completely over-the-top response to being discounted. These are the people that can justify unspeakably horrible acts in the name of abandonment: the Hitler's, the sexual abusers, the child molesters, the concentration camp guards, the inventors of bombs, etc. There is no room in their lives for actual people, everything becomes secondary to surviving the next potential discount. It's not people they murder, maim, torture, defile, degrade, use and abuse, it's objects. People don't die, they're "collateral damage". Children aren't physically defiled and mentally scarred, they're "being taught a lesson". Victims of child sexual abuse "were up for it". There is always a "good" reason.